Textbooks Now Available On The iPad

Today was Apple’s event that situated around changing the education market. Well, it seems the tech giant is disrupting yet another industry, yet again. They announced that textbooks will be coming to the iPad.

Students will no longer have to carry about 800 pounds of books and can have everything they need, right there at their fingertips. Textbooks on the iPad are available starting today.

Via USA Today:

“At New York’s Guggenheim Museum, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing Phil Schiller unveiled iBooks 2, an interactive, full-screen digital textbooks experience that makes liberal use of video and animations and the swiping and pinching gestures familiar to anyone who has an iPad.”

The company also announced the iBooks Author tool which is free and available on the Mac. It has custom templates to help authors create their own digital books for the platform. Now, textbooks have been available for a while on Kindle, a direct competitor in the digital book market.

Apple sees that there’s big potential in this area and being that the iPad is being used more and more in the classroom, it’s a natural fit.

“The company’s hope is that students will find the new textbooks engaging. Students studying high school biology, for example, can view 3-D animated models of structures within a cell. They can tap a word or a glossary definition, pinch to return to the table of contents, and drag their finger to highlight a passage. The books can automatically turn student notes into study cards.”

As they did with getting all the big music labels on board with iTunes, Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are early publishing partners who control 90% of the market.

Do you see textbooks via the iPad catching on?